Wireless communication has become nearly ubiquitous and competition between service providers often induces subscribers to switch to carriers that a subscriber believes or perceives to be providing a better “deal.” Until recently, an adverse consequence of changing carriers has been the forfeiture of a wireless phone number. Recently, service providers have been compelled to offer number portability by which a subscriber of one service provider can terminate his service and carry or “port” the number given to him by one service provider to another service provider. This is possible as long as the number remains in the same relative geographic location (i.e., the number remains within the original rate center.) It is even possible to port a wireline number to a wireless service provider. In the future, number portability will provide the ability to port a phone number from one disparate geographic location to another.
Such number portability has led to at least one problem for carriers.
Heretofore, it was possible to identify a switch from which a call originated and hence the service provider of the switch from whence a call originated, simply by the first few digits of a phone number. The identity of a service provider responsible for collecting revenue from a customer for a call could be determined by the number from which the call originated.
With the advent of service provider number portability, a wireless subscriber who obtains a wireless phone number from a service provider could have his mobile phone number “ported” to a new wireless service provider. If the subscriber uses his wireless phone to forward calls to another location, the calls that were made to the subscriber's phone, would need to be routed by the subscriber's new service provider to the forwarded destination number. If the forwarding phone's number were used to determine the service provider from which to exact payment for the call forwarding, using just the phone numbers it would appear that a call originated from the mobile customer's old service provider's network.
As is well-known, charges for so-called long-distance calls and charges for so-called “toll” calls are enhanced over the charges imposed by carriers for “local” calls. As is also known, the determination and hence the charge for a call is primarily determined by the geographic distance between the location of the calling phone and the phone being called.
Heretofore, it was possible to identify a switch that a call originated from and hence the geographic location of where a call originated from, simply by the first few digits of a phone number. The charge to exact from a customer for a call could be determined by comparing the number being called to the number from which the call originated and calculating or deriving the distance and systems through which the call would have been carried.
With the advent of number portability, in prior art, carriers have begun to identify the originating location of a call by means of a the 6 digit area code and office code of a location routing number assigned to the originating switch since the mobile number no longer identifies the originating switch or service provider. In the case of redirecting a call from a gateway switch, the gateway doesn't have the 6 digit code to identify the location of the switch from which the call would have originated if the forwarding phone had placed the call itself from its home service area. The intent of this invention is to provide a method by which a gateway switch can obtain data sufficient to identify the service provider and location of the switch, or geographic division thereof, from which a redirected call would have originated had the call originated from the mobile subscriber's home service area.
In order to more properly bill for call forwarding services provided to mobile phone subscribers who have ported their phone numbers from one service provider to another, there exists a need for tracking the service provider and the location of the mobile phone switching system, or a geographic division thereof, from which a mobile phone number that forwarded a call, would have originated the call if the forwarding phone had placed the forwarded call itself from its home service area.